www.designbyilona.com - solar prints

My work as a lamp and furniture designer has always featured the use of my own photographs enhanced with the use of line work, printing, and hand coloring, and also the use of photographs transferred and baked to glass, then enhanced with the use of water color pencils.

Over the last two years the focus has extended, with workshops in solar printing. I enjoy using the single exposure technique because while it preserves a certain amount of detail, it also gives an element of abstraction, of areas where detail has been left out. Although these results are never quite predictable, they are usually exciting and give me ideas for the addition of line work added to the plate before inking, or texture during the inking process, or hand coloring after pulling the print.

My photography is themed and some of the themes that I have enjoyed working with are nature, people, historical places and cityscapes. When taking pictures of plants, I prefer close-ups of texture or of odd shapes, and of the way light shines through the leaf or flower so as to alter its form.

When I am photographing people or places, I like to explore the ways in which one is related to the other. In my prints on the Lahore Fort, I wanted to show the way history is layered, and the way people come to sit within its walls. Even if they are picnicking, there is a sense of continuation with the past. There is also the sense of elegant decay, and as in my pictures of plants, the use of texture.

Although I prefer printing in black and white, then adding colour with water colour pencils and tea washes, I have experimented with viscosity printing in my truck dreams series, which attempts to focus on the colour and poetry in truck drivers' lives.

My new series are collagraph and paper works, and include cacti prints and semi abstracts from my collection Within the Leaf. Some of the prints are pulled on a press while others are hand rubbed, a lengthy process which involves rubbing the back of the paper with a spoon. I also sometimes incorporate stitching and chine colle in my work.